Month: August 2015

Good news: You have decided to delve into the realm of referral marketing and launch a customer referral program for your e-commerce site. If you read the first blog of our two-part blog series dedicated to customer referral programs for e-commerce sites, you were enlightened on what referral marketing is, what a referral program looks like for an e-commerce business and how you can identify the program ROI to determine if a customer referral program will work for your e-commerce business. If you haven’t read the first blog, or are still uncertain, please check it out.

If you are old enough (Millennials excused here!) to remember the first retail websites in the mid ‘90s, they were pretty boring, basically online versions of print brochures that took ages to download on your dial-up modem. It wasn’t until companies like Amazon, eBay and Pegasus realised the potential to disintermediate traditional retail, that ecommerce was born. But that didn’t bring much interaction beyond ‘people who bought this also bought that’.

Your big, bulging wallets, as it turns out. Now that influencer marketing is the fastest-growing method of customer acquisition, it’s become a big-money game. Twenty-five percent of brands are spending over half a million dollars on it every year. Five percent are spending over $5m. That translates to about 200 bucks for every half-arsed “Hey, guys – check out this amazing thing I’ve discovered” and ten grand for every “I just spent a day testing the latest doo-dah from thingumabob.”

Over the past several years, social media has evolved and grown into one of the most powerful tools available to marketing professionals. In our digital age, virtually all businesses around the world depend on social media as a marketing tool to some extent. In fact, if a company doesn’t promote itself through social media platforms, many customers or potential clients could very well consider the company to be less reliable and not as professional than other businesses that utilize the power of social media. Along with the explosion of social media, social referral marketing has become an increasingly common and extremely effective means of marketing a business.